Authoritarianism in response to threat is possible among the left but more prevalent among the right: a critique of the LWA literature

Introduction There has been a surge of interest in left-wing authoritarianism (LWA) since Conway et al.'s (2018) work on the construct. This new wave has found that LWA is just as prevalent as the more commonly-studied RWA. Following Nilsson's (2024) critique of the LWA literature and Osborne et al.'s (2023) suggestion to study threat and authoritarianism across the political spectrum, we conductedsecondary data analyses on the interaction between political orientation and different types of threat and the desire for a more authoritarian leader. Method Two cross-sectional samples were collected in Italy in 2022 (N=1159) and 2023 (N=1668). In both samples, participants were asked their perceived need for a more authoritarian leader and their perceived personal, physical, and economic threat towards two potentially threatening events: The COVID pandemic and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. Results We found that (1) a left-wing political orientation was associated with a desire for a more authoritarian leader with reference to the Russian Invasion in the 2023 data; a right-wing political orientation was associated with this desire in the other cases; (2) the effect of threat depended on the larger context; (3) there was little difference in the above relationship across political orientation. Discussion Although we found no evidence that LWA is a prevalent as RWA, the relationship between threat and authoritarianism likely depends on the nature of the threats and the perceived capability of an authoritarian leader to resolve these threats. Pre-registered hypotheses, data, and R code are available at https://osf.io/65hrc.